Expiring gmail messages

Expiring gmail messages

[Eric Abrahamsen]

I'm using nnimap through local isync to sync with a gmail account. I use
this particular account to send myself notifications from a few websites
I run, the vast majority of which are instantly-deletable
spam-and-broken-link notifications.

I used to use POP and just expire-to-delete the messages as they came
in. When I switched to IMAP I forgot to delete those messages off the
server before I synced, and ended up with about 250,000 messages I
didn't want.

Since it's Gmail, my clever solution was to mark all those messages as
expirable, then set it up so that the expiration target was
"Gmail/[Trash]". That way they were expired to trash, then synced to
Trash on the server, then after 30 days Gmail would delete them
permanently from the server, and that deletion would get synced back to
my local installation.

I finally got them all moved into the trash recently, but just now a
bunch of the messages in the Trash got "re-expired", I guess right back
into the Trash. Now isync wants to sync 50,000 messages with the server,
presumably "moving" them from the Trash to the Trash. That will take a
week, so I'm asking here.

I assumed that the expiration mark was following the messages to the
Trash, so that after a period of time they become eligible for
"re-expiration". But when I go into the Trash group locally, the
messages all seem to have the "O" mark , not "E". I'm not sure that
actually means anything, though. The parameters for the Trash group are
this:

((modseq . "98032")
 (uidvalidity . "1371985468")
 (active 1 . 247068)
 (permanent-flags %Answered %Flagged %Deleted %Seen %Draft gnus-expire %*))

Is it the "gnus-expire" in there that's causing me problems? I don't
really know what that parameter does, specifically, but before I start
syncing thousands of messages, I wanted to ask here...

Sorry for the long-winded post...

Eric

Re: Expiring gmail messages

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> ((modseq . "98032")
>  (uidvalidity . "1371985468")
>  (active 1 . 247068)
>  (permanent-flags %Answered %Flagged %Deleted %Seen %Draft gnus-expire %*))
>
> Is it the "gnus-expire" in there that's causing me problems? I don't
> really know what that parameter does, specifically, but before I start
> syncing thousands of messages, I wanted to ask here...

No, the gnus-expire permanent flag shouldn't affect much, I think...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/